


Tidal Breath

by cheerynoir



Series: Drowning!verse [12]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Coping, Depression, F/M, Gen, Injury Recovery, Just in general, M/M, POV Second Person, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Present Tense, Psychological Trauma, Ramsay is also still at large, Ramsay is his own warning, Rape Recovery, Recovery, Robb Stark is a Gift, Spring is Coming, Theon & Jeyne get out of the hospital
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-10-01 23:32:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10203332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cheerynoir/pseuds/cheerynoir
Summary: MarchFree of the hospital, Theon stumbles down the long road of recovery, hand in hand with Jeyne. They have a little help along with way.





	

They let you out of the hospital at the beginning of March. There’s still snow on the ground, and your breath clouds the frost-laced air. It hurts to breathe, but it’s a good sort of pain.

Jeyne clings to you with one hand and her father with the other, and you keep the elder Poole sharp in the corner of your eye. He looks at his daughter like she’s Baelor blessed, like she’s risen from the grave. She hobbles along in her walking cast, jaw set.

You’re glad someone else looks at her like that, too.

You must make a strange parade, limping from the hospital lobby to the fleet of cars that await you, warm and dry.

Asha walks at your elbow, sharp-eyed, and Dagmer flanks her, shoulder to shoulder with Rodrik the reader. Three of Jeyne’s five sisters cluster around her and their father; the eldest has toddlers in tow.

And Robb. Robb walks a little ahead of you, like he’s testing the waters and looking for threats. His father waits in the car. Snow melts in Rob’s auburn hair, like it always has, like it always will, and something goes sharp and tight in your chest looking at it.

You look at your feet, slipping in boots that don’t fit right anymore with all your missing toes. Your mouth aches. Your buzz is wearing off, whatever they last gave you through the IV drip-drip-dripping away.

“You didn’t,” you say, and stop, wincing. Run your tongue over your jagged teeth and don’t wince when the muscle tears and the taste of copper floods your mouth with its familiar tang. “You didn’t have to do this.”

He looks at you like you’ve lost your mind. But it’s a fleeting look, there and gone. He smiles like it hurts him, and you want to sympathize. You get it. 

“But I want to,” he says.

You can’t look at him, so you fuss with your black and gold beanie and check the watch that Asha gave you. It is 11:21 AM – and twenty-six seconds. Your neck is bare and goose-pimpled. You haven’t asked what they did with your collar yet. You’re not sure you want to know.

(There’s a small, spiteful part of you that wishes whoever cut the lock off burned the pink leather to ash. Mostly, though, you just miss the weight and the way it pressed on your wind-pipe.)

“We’ll see you at the flat,” Asha tell him when the lot of you are standing in the parking lot, squinting at the sun’s glare off the snow.

Robb smiles again, looks at you. “Yeah,” he says. “I’ll see you soon.” You look back – and keep looking when he turns and hurries, slipping a little, towards his father’s car. He doesn’t touch you before he goes.

You look to your left, and Jeyne eases away from your hand like she doesn’t know what to do without it. You’ve spent a month (seven months) living in each other’s pockets, sharing space and air and food, and this will be the first night you’ve slept alone in what feels like years.

But her family looks at her like she will never be lost again, and you can feel Asha’s stare like a brand on the back of your neck.

“I’ll call,” she says, and you meet her eyes. They are wide and brown and fearful, but it is the good kind of fear. Like there is an adventure on the horizon and she wants to tuck it into her pocket, if only she could get up the nerve to reach out.

_To die would be an awfully big adventure_ – the phrase comes from nowhere and everywhere, but you shake the words off. You have had enough excitement for one life-time.

“I know,” you reply. She smiles, and doesn’t flinch when you grin back.

“Jeyne,” says her father, low and prying. He’s missed his girl, he doesn’t trust you, as much as she’s told him about how they crawled through a window and flew through the snow.

She hugs you tightly and for an instant you can’t breathe. Your skin crawls and you tense, shaking. You think you smell melon liquor and wet dog and Ramsay’s cologne, but the next shaky breathe only drags in cheap hospital soap and the earthy smell of salt and skin.

You hug her back until your arms ache, until you think you’ll snap her in half.

“See you soon,” she mumbles into your neck, and you press a kiss to her beanie.

“Be safe,” you tell her. A smile stretches across your face, ghastly and bleak. “Don’t accept rides from strangers.”

( _That’s how he got me_ , she told you once, pressed against you in the woodshed when the light streamed warm and buttery through the cracks in the walls. _It was raining and I was walking home. He offered me a ride and I thought – well, friend of a friend of a friend, right?_ )

She laughs, and her smile is a warm and bitter thing as her father gently pulls her away, his over-large jacket swallowing her whole. Her sisters fold around her, and a toddler – hefted onto a hip – peers over a hunched shoulder and babbles at you. It waves. Your fingers twitch.

Asha’s hand is warm and hard and not unkind, pressing against your shoulder firmly. You wince, but she seems not to notice, just presses on.

“Let’s go home,” she says. Dagmer nods once, and Rodrik starts the battered old Toyota, flowered with more rust than you remember. It’s strangely familiar, that car.

It takes a second for you to realize that it’s the same one you were driving all those months ago – the one you left at the cabin. A giggle breaks between your shattered teeth, somewhere between hysterical and awestruck.

You’re still laughing – bleak, gallows humour laughter - when Asha tucks you into the back seat and clambers in after you. The interior still smells like cigarettes and salt water and weed; traces of your old cologne linger, even under the smell of dust.

“Found the car before they found you,” she tells you, her eyes dark and stormy. Her hand rests between your shoulder blades, warm even through your shirts. “Useless fucks.”

You doze off ten minutes later, your head on her shoulder, and wake when the car stops. Your apartment building looms like a crippled giant, and for a second your breath hitches. You stumble over the curb, getting out of the car, but it’s Dagmer who steadies you, not Ramsay – not Ramsay ever again – and you can’t breathe for the ghosts in your lungs, suddenly.

It was cold that night, last year. _Gods_ , you realize. It’s been a year. A year since Robb had Jeyne and Ramsay took you home from that party, stumbling and high on badly-cut E and too drunk to get it up. A year since he tumbled you through the front door of a damp and empty apartment, onto a bed you didn’t sleep in near enough.

A year since you _asked for it—_

You realize you’re holding your breath when it all comes gushing out of you shakily. Asha catches your eye but you look away, chewing your tongue. 

“’s nothing,” you mutter, but the memories cloud your brain like a haze as you hobble up the stairs. Ghosts haunt your every limping step, and by the time you make it through the front door to an apartment like something out of a dream, you dry-heave in the threshold and blink back tears. You heart trips in your chest and breathing happens in little sips. Black flowers unfurl in the corners of your vision.

“Theon?” Asha asks, gripping at your shoulder too tightly. You stumble a few more steps into the apartment. “Theon, talk to me.”

“Did you get the blood out?” you ask. You’re staring at the sofa where he sprawled out, at the patch of carpet where you lay at his feet. Once, between Asha leaving and her coming home, you moved the heavy thing a couple of inches closer to the TV.

The blood didn’t come out, no matter how you scrubbed at it.

“What?” she asks.

You shake your head and try to breathe. But you slam your eyes closed when Dagmer and Rodrik follow your line of sight and head that way.

You hear grunting, the scrape of something heavy against the floor. Then there’s quiet, before Asha starts swearing.

You flinch back, and there is a heat you nearly trample in your haste to get away from that unfamiliar anger.

“Hey, Theon, hey. You okay?”

Robb. Of course.

“Fine,” you say, but you still can’t breathe and the ground swims. You shake your head, trembling. “I’m fine,” you mumble.

You stare at your slush-soaked sneakers, curling your clammy toes in your damp socks. Robb must be looking, must be seeing the old blood-stain, must be putting two and two together.

You’re weak and he knows it – he’s always known it, but it’s so much clearer now. What you let happen, what you wanted—

“I’m taking him out,” Robb says, no louder than usual. It cuts through Asha hoarse cursing and the low muttering of your uncles. “Getting some air.”

He doesn’t touch you at all, but you trail so close behind him that you nearly trample his heels.

“Sorry,” you mumble. Stumble back. “Sorry.”

“I think this is the most I’ve heard you apologize in as long as I’ve known you,” says Robb. You glance at him, startled, flinching, and he smiles, caught somewhere between heartbroken and grimly amused.

“Sorry,” you say. Once, you knew him better than breathing. Now, everything hurts, and it is better safe than sorry.

“No, I didn’t -” Robb cuts himself off, wincing. Rakes a hand through his hair. “You don’t have to apologize to me,” he says.

Liar.

You look at your boots, at the rain-wet concrete.

“I shouldn’t have said that, before. It was stupid of me,” says Robb. His hand hovers over should shoulder, spilling heat.

“He liked when I was polite,” you mutter, as close to an explanation as you can get without gagging. The phantoms in your apartment curl like smoke around you, and they linger just as badly. The damp air helps, but not by much. Everything smells like brine and bad memories. “Until he didn’t.”

Robb doesn’t say anything about that. When you steal a glance at him – looking up, though you’ve always been taller – his eyes are flat and cold as northern ice, and a muscle works in his jaw under the reddish beard.

“You’ll break your teeth,” you say. The words come from someone else. “Grinding them like that. Then we’d both be eating applesauce for every meal.”

“I like applesauce,” Robb says. He smiles a little, looking at you. “Wouldn’t be the first meal we’ve shared.”

“Guess not,” you say. Your back hits the grimy brick of the apartment complex, and you huddle against it, grounded.

This feels so much like a year ago, as though nothing has changed, and everything has. You wish for a cigarette.

You can’t remember the last time you’ve have a cigarette.

The closest you got was Ramsay using you as an ashtray.

You touch shaking fingers to the burns on the insides of your arms.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks. His voice – warm and earnest - shatters something inside you. You clutch at your sleeves.

“No,” you say. Then, blurting, “Wasn’t just the cabin, what he did. It was here too. Before. Things were – bad. In the cabin, but they were – not great, here, either. Better.”

“That so?” Robb asks, brittle.

You duck your head and nod. The upturned collar of your coat brushes your chin.

The air is damp and cold and it helps. Your head feels clearer, the memories of the apartment slipping away like cobwebs.

“Theon,” Robb says. Stops. “Theon – We lived together before, right?”

“As kids,” you say. “Until Asha got old enough to sign the paper-work.” You smile to yourself, faint and jagged. “No idea why your family fostered me – your mom always hated me.”

“That’s not what I meant,” he says. He touches your arm, very gently. So gently you mistake him for a breath of wind, and do not flinch.

“What did you mean, then?”

“Well. You shouldn’t have to live in a place that – that Ramsay took from you,” he says, stumbling through the words like you and Jeyne stumbled through the snow. “And I know Smalljon wouldn’t mind – that is to say, I mean-”

It’s a wonder he ever got a girlfriend, with a mush-mouth that bad.

“You have a couch?” you offer, dry as the sidewalk isn’t.

He lets out a breath, cheeks puffed. “Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Come live with me, just until you get back on your feet.”

You look down the street, see Ned Stark idling in a parked car a block or two down. You breathe in the damp, clammy air. Look up at the apartment you’ve lived in since you were 16, its listing grey bricks and dark windows. It has always been a dump, but with Asha it had been home, even if she was only a spectre half the time.

It had been home, in one way or another. But there’s still blood on the carpet, and grooves in your headboard where your fingernails caught. You’d bet there’s still a bottle of melon liqueur in the cabinet, and a gutted first-aid kit in your bedside table.

“Okay,” you say, after a long moment. Cool wind runs damp fingers through your greying hair like benediction, like starting over. “Okay.”

 

#

 

It comes with strings – of course it does. Asha presses a cheap flip phone into your hand, stocked with minutes. Demands you call her every night, and answer when it rings.

Cleftjaw makes the drive north, every few days, to see how you’re doing.

Asha also gets a key to the apartment – Robb’s apartment – but you’re pretty sure that’s only a thing because Robb’s convinced she’ll kick it down if given half a chance.

So you move in with Robb, and take the subway to your doctors’ appointments. Leaving the apartment otherwise is – hard. The world is so much bigger than you remember.

You don’t make eye contact, and you clean when you can’t sleep, which is often. Smalljon says the kitchen has never looked cleaner, and you don’t tell him what Ramsay would do to you if he found a spot of grime you’d missed.

You sleep on the sofa and call Jeyne often. It eases something in you, almost. Bad things happen when she’s out of your sight.

It’s 4:14 – and fifty-three seconds – in the morning when the burner phone buzzes in your palm. You don’t look at the display before you answer. The kitchen sink smells of bleach and lemon, and your hands are chapped and red and steady.

“Can’t sleep?” you asked.

Jeyne’s ragged laugh is a burst of static. You shut your eyes, and breathe deep.

“I miss the nest,” she says. You huff out a sigh.

“Robb has a fold-out,” you tell her. “I sleep under it, with blankets with me. It helps.”

“My dad started crying the last time he checked on me and found me sleeping on the floor. I moved to the closet, after, with a note.”

“Parents,” you say, like you have any frame of reference.

“Why Robb?”

“What?”

“You said – you’re staying with Robb?”

“…He offered,” you say, dry-mouthed. Hunted. “I – I couldn’t. The apartment…”

“Ah,” she says, understanding, and you let the words die in your throat.

Silence is more comfortable between you than conversation.

You let it stretch like long summer days, like taffy from the puller, like a decent mother’s patience.

She breathes, in and out, like the tide.

You slump down, burrowed beneath the fold out bed, huddled in blankets, and let the soft gush of it lull you to sleep.

 

#

 

It’s three in the afternoon – 3:48 and 13 seconds – when you wriggle your way free of the make-shift nest.

The apartment is quiet, but Eddard Stark stands in the kitchen, a mug of tea looking fragile in his massive hand. He wears his work uniform, creased with wear. Must have just got off-shift.

You are acutely aware of the grease in your hair. The pillow lines and stubble on your cheek. Clothes you haven’t changed in three days, maybe four. The chips in your teeth the dentist hasn’t fixed yet. You mismatched socks.

What toes remain flex against the cheap tile.

“Mister Stark,” you say. The words come from far away, from the bottom of a well, the centre of a storm.

He doesn’t smile when he sees you. You’re used to it.

“Theon,” he says, his expression solemn, something like disappointment in his tone. You’re used to that too.

“Robb’s due back soon,” you say. Classes. Ethics, maybe. You’d heard Robb and the Smalljon talking about it while you pretended to sleep.

“I didn’t come for Robb,” he says.

Your stomach drops, twisting. You don’t know if it’s fear or pleasure doing it.

“You found him?’ you ask, hushed.

Eddard Stark grimaces, and looks away. “No,” he says. Clears his throat. “Are you sure he never mentioned any properties…”

It’s a haze of static after that. You don’t know how you make it through the rest.

But Eddard Stark leaves you there. You check the locks on the windows and doors three times. Then you call Jeyne.

Bad things happen when she’s out of your sight.

**Author's Note:**

> I LIIIIIIIIIIIVE.
> 
> There's one left and then an epilogue, guys. For real this time. Let me know what you think, yeah?
> 
> Come say hi on [tumblr](http://www.cheerynoir.tumblr.com/).


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